Identifying dyslexia risk for sport-related concussion management: Sensitivity and specificity of self-report and rapid naming.

BACKGROUND: Dyslexia is the most common type of learning disability and studies have shown that student-athletes with learning disabilities sustain more concussions than their non-affected peers. However, current methods of dyslexia identification in college students are potentially invalid because they rely on students to self-report formal dyslexia diagnoses. METHODS: To test the accuracy of self-report against two alternative methods of dyslexia screening, 94 college students completed three dyslexia symptom inventories, two rapid naming (RAN) tasks, and a standard word reading measure. RESULTS: Reliability was acceptable for screening purposes on the inventories (α =.70, -.72), and excellent for RAN (α = .91, -.94). Specificity was acceptable (82.5%), but sensitivity was low (14.3%) when students self-reported suspected diagnoses of reading impairment. Sensitivity and specificity were higher for the digit RAN task (71 and 98%, respectively) compared to the letter RAN task (57 and 90%). Sensitivity (92.7%) and specificity (92.5%) were optimal when a cut-score of ≥27 seconds was used. A binary logistic regression showed digit RAN alone significantly predicted whether students were classified as typical or inefficient readers, p< .001, whereas the most reliable dyslexia inventory alone did not, p=.284. Including inventories along with RAN provided no additional predictive value. CONCLUSION: Self-report inventories missed many cases of inefficient word reading. The digit RAN task classified 93.6% of the cases correctly compared to 72.3% for self-report inventory. Thus, we recommend that neuropsychologists working with college concussion management programs add to their baseline screening protocols the digit RAN task, which can be completed in less than one minute.

Spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia: working memory and vocabulary effects.

BACKGROUND: Individuals with dyslexia demonstrate syntactic difficulties on tasks of language comprehension, yet little is known about spoken language production in this population. AIMS: To investigate whether spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia is less proficient than in typical readers, and to determine whether group differences can be attributable to cognitive differences between groups. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Fifty-one college students with and without dyslexia were asked to produce sentences from stimuli comprising a verb and two nouns. Verb types varied in argument structure and morphological form and nouns varied in animacy. Outcome measures were precision (measured by fluency, grammaticality and completeness) and efficiency (measured by response times). Vocabulary and working memory tests were also administered and used as predictors of sentence production performance. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Relative to non-dyslexic peers, students with dyslexia responded significantly slower and produced sentences that were significantly less precise in terms of fluency, grammaticality and completeness. The primary predictors of precision and efficiency were working memory, which differed between groups, and vocabulary, which did not. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: College students with dyslexia were significantly less facile and flexible on this spoken sentence-production task than typical readers, which is consistent with previous studies of school-age children with dyslexia. Group differences in performance were traced primarily to limited working memory, and were somewhat mitigated by strong vocabulary.

Identifying Dyslexia Risk in Student-Athletes: A Preliminary Protocol for Concussion Management.

Learning disability (LD) has been identified as a potential risk factor for a sport-related concussion, yet students with LD are rarely included in concussion research. Here, we draw special attention to dyslexia, a common but often underdiagnosed LD. Reading and learning problems commonly associated with dyslexia are often masked by protective factors, such as high verbal ability or general intelligence. Hence, high-achieving individuals with dyslexia may not be identified as being in a high-risk category. To ensure that students with dyslexia are included in LD concussion research and identified as LD in baseline testing, we provide athletic trainers with an overview of dyslexia and a preliminary screening protocol that is sensitive to dyslexia, even among academically high-achieving students in secondary school and college.

Exploring Text and Icon Graph Interpretation in Students with Dyslexia: An Eye-tracking Study.

A growing body of research suggests that individuals with dyslexia struggle to use graphs efficiently. Given the persistence of orthographic processing deficits in dyslexia, this study tested whether graph interpretation deficits in dyslexia are directly related to difficulties processing the orthographic components of graphs (i.e. axes and legend labels). Participants were 80 college students with and without dyslexia. Response times and eye movements were recorded as students answered comprehension questions about simple data displayed in bar graphs. Axes and legends were labelled either with words (mixed-modality graphs) or icons (orthography-free graphs). Students also answered informationally equivalent questions presented in sentences (orthography-only condition). Response times were slower in the dyslexic group only for processing sentences. However, eye tracking data revealed group differences for processing mixed-modality graphs, whereas no group differences were found for the orthography-free graphs. When processing bar graphs, students with dyslexia differ from their able reading peers only when graphs contain orthographic features. Implications for processing informational text are discussed. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Sentence comprehension in young adults with developmental dyslexia.

This study investigated the effects of syntactic complexity on written sentence comprehension in compensated adults with dyslexia. Because working memory (WM) plays a key role in processing complex sentences, and individuals with dyslexia often demonstrate persistent deficits in WM, we hypothesized that individuals with dyslexia would perform more poorly on tasks designed to assess the comprehension of syntactic structures that are especially taxing on WM (e.g., passives, sentences with relative clauses). Compared to their nondyslexic peers, individuals with dyslexia were significantly less accurate and marginally slower on passive sentences. For sentences containing relative clauses, the dyslexic group was also less accurate but did not differ in response times. Covarying WM and word reading in both analyses eliminated group differences showing that syntactic deficits in adults with dyslexia are constrained by both WM and word-reading ability. These findings support previous research showing that syntactic processing deficits are characteristic of dyslexia, even among high-achieving students.